'(Why Learn a Lisp?)

Programming in Lisp is a different kind of programming. Some things seem similar
to your daily imperative treadmill, but mostly it’s different. There’s a
different lexicon of terms, REPL-driven (or rather, -dominated) programming,
there’s immutability, a really different type of (par)editing, a higher level of
conciseness, a naturalness to using HoFs, a leaning on a small set of primitives,
recursion as the norm, and so on.

It’s worth gaining some proficiency with a Lisp, if anything, to change the way
you think about programming. In this post I explore the Lisp landscape, and try
to convince you to get in on the Racket, for edification, fun, and
even profit.

Lisp Engines

Lisp is embedded in a lot of places.

Despite Lua being often recognized as being The Embeddable Language,
surprisingly many tools are programmable in Lisp. Some examples include: Gimp,
Guix, Emacs, AutoCAD, LilyPond,
GnuCash,
Festival

Some of those are seminal classics that can teach you how to program like almost
no other book. Notice that bent towards Scheme. That’s the beauty of Racket:
decades of academic knowledge still applicable to a modern language. Most of
those books available for free in web form.

If you want to get into Artificial Intelligence (AI), you’ll surely spend some
time in Lisp.

So why learn Racket?

Successful Lisp companies/sites

About Micah

Saluton! Welcome to my blog. I’m a developer, sysadmin, and
entrepreneur interested in education, functional programming
(Clojure, Racket, OCaml), Linux, FreeBSD,
Emacs, Ansible, and lots of other FOSS. Most of the content
herein takes the form of recipes and opinions. See the
README for more.